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<h1 class="article-title">This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist</h1>
<div class="metadata"> <span class="authors"><a
href="http://m.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/"
class="author voice ui-link" rel="author">Ta-Nehisi Coates</a></span> <time
datetime="2014-05-01T11:30:33-04:00">May 1 2014, 11:30 AM ET<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/">http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/</a></small></small></b><br>
</time></div>
<article class="content blog-content"><br>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">The question Cliven Bundy put to his
audience last week—Was the black family better off as property?—is as
immoral as it unoriginal. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">As both</span><span
style="font-size: 16px;"> </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/conservatives-condemn-cliven-bundy"
style="font-size: 16px;">Adam Serwer</a><span style="font-size: 16px;">
and </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2014/04/24/cliven_bundy_and_some_conservative_pundits_are_not_so_different.html"
style="font-size: 16px;">Jamelle Bouie</a><span
style="font-size: 16px;"> point out</span><span
style="font-size: 16px;">,</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"> the
roster of conservative theorists who imply that black people were
better off being whipped, worked, and raped are legion. </span><span
style="font-size: 16px;">Their ranks include economists </span><a
class="ui-link"
href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704881304576094221050061598"
style="font-size: 16px;">Walter Williams and </a><a class="ui-link"
href="http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2004/08/17/a_painful_anniversary/page/full"
style="font-size: 16px;">Thomas Sowell</a><span
style="font-size: 16px;">, former congressman </span><a
class="ui-link"
href="http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/04/02/12-quotes-that-will-make-liberals-heads-explode-from-allen-wests-new-book/"
style="font-size: 16px;">Allen West</a><span style="font-size: 16px;">,
sitting Representative </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/07/08/michele-bachmann-salutes-the-upside-to-slavery/"
style="font-size: 16px;">Trent Franks</a><span style="font-size: 16px;">,
singer </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/29/nras-nugent-great-society-responsible-for-more/195662"
style="font-size: 16px;">Ted Nugent</a><span style="font-size: 16px;">,
and presidential aspirants </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/11/gop-candidates-caught-in-slavery-controversy/"
style="font-size: 16px;">Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann</a><span
style="font-size: 16px;">.</span></p>
<p>A fair-minded reader will note that each of these conservatives is
careful to not praise slavery and to note his or her disgust at the
practice.<strong> </strong>This is neither distinction nor difference.
Cliven Bundy's disquisition begins <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agXns-W60MI">with a similar hedge</a>: "W<span>e've
progressed quite a bit from that day until now and we sure don't want
to go back</span>."<span> </span><font style="font-size: 16px;">With
so little substantive difference between Bundy and other conservatives,
it becomes tough to understand last week's backpedaling in any </font><span
style="font-size: 16px;">intellectually</span><font
style="font-size: 16px;"> coherent way. </font></p>
<p><font size="3">But style is the hero. </font><span
style="font-size: 16px;">Cliven Bundy is old, white, and male. He
likes to wave an American flag while spurning the American government
and pals around with the militia movement.<strong> </strong>He does
not so much use the word "Negro"—which would be bad enough—but "nigra,"
in the manner of villain from <em>Mississippi Burning</em> or <em>A
Time to Kill</em>. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">In short,
Cliven Bundy</span><span style="font-size: 16px;"> looks, and sounds,
much like what white people take racism to be. </span></p>
<p>The problem with Cliven Bundy isn't that he is a racist but that he
is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton
picking. This makes white people feel bad. <span
style="font-size: 16px;">The elegant racist knows how to injure
non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt.
Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just
happened to <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html?_r=0">stumble
into the Neshoba County fair</a> and mention state's rights. Oafish
racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom
Thurmond's singularly segregationist candidacy. </span></p>
<p><font size="3">Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It
disguises itself in the national </font>vocabulary, avoids epithets
and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One
should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting
rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism
lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax.
Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">"The way to stop discrimination on
the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,"</span><a
class="ui-link"
href="http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2006/2006_05_908"> John
Roberts elegantly wrote</a>. <font size="3">Liberals have yet to come
up with a credible retort. That is because the theories of John Roberts
are prettier than the theories of most liberals.</font><font size="3">
But more, it is because liberals do not</font><span
style="font-size: 16px;"> understand that America has never
discriminated on the basis of race (which does not exist) but on the
basis of racism (which most certainly does.) </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Ideologies of hatred have never
required coherent definitions of the hated. Islamophobes kill Sikhs as
easily as they kill Muslims. Stalin needed no <a class="ui-link"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak">consistent definition</a> of
"Kulaks" to launch a war of <a class="ui-link"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization">Dekulakization</a>. </span>"I
decide who is a Jew," <a class="ui-link"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger">Karl Lueger said</a>. <span
style="font-size: 16px;">Slaveholders decided who was a nigger and who
wasn't. The decision was arbitrary. The effects are not.</span><span
style="font-size: 16px;"> Ahistorical liberals—like most
Americans—still believe that race invented racism, when in fact the
reverse is true. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">The hallmark of
elegant racism is the acceptance of mainstream consensus, and
exploitation of all its intellectual fault lines. </span></p>
<div class="text parbase text-8 section">
<p data-uninsertable="has-special-tag"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Here
is a lovely illustration of elegant racism:</span></p>
</div>
<figure><img alt=""
src="cid:part1.01020109.07040807@freedomarchives.org"
style="width: 92.7% ! important; max-width: 570px ! important; height: auto ! important; -moz-box-sizing: border-box;"
height="477" width="570"></figure>
<p>This graph is from Robert J. Sampson's essential 2011 profile of
Chicago, <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.amazon.com/Great-American-City-Enduring-Neighborhood/dp/0226734560"
style="font-size: 16px;"><em>Great American City</em></a><span
style="font-size: 16px;">. Sampson's data </span><span
style="font-size: 16px;">depicts incarceration rates in the early to
mid-'90s in Chicago among black (black dots) and white neighborhoods
(white dots.) Increasingly, sociologists like Sampson are showing us
how our brute and strained vocabulary fails to articulate the problem
of racism. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">Conservatives and
liberals frequently wonder how it could be that unequal outcomes endure
for blacks and whites, even after controlling for income or "class."
That is because conservatives and liberals <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/">underestimate
the achievements of white supremacy</a> and still believe that
comparisons between a "black middle class" and a "white middle class"
have actual meaning. In fact, black and white people—of any class—live
in wholly different worlds.</span></p>
<p>A phrase like "mass incarceration" obviates the fact that "mass
incarceration" is mostly localized in black neighborhoods. <span
style="font-size: 16px;">In Chicago during the '90s, there was no
overlap between the incarceration rates of black and white
neighborhoods. The most incarcerated white neighborhoods in Chicago are
still better off than the least incarcerated black neighborhoods. The
most incarcerated </span><font style="font-size: 16px;">black
neighborhood in Chicago is </font><em style="font-size: 16px;">40
times </em><font style="font-size: 16px;">worse than the most
incarcerated white neighborhood. </font></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Perhaps black people are for reasons
of culture or genetics 40 times more criminal than white people. </span><span
style="font-size: 16px;">Or perhaps there is <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2009/November/09-crt-1187.html">something
more elegant at work</a>:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Justice Department announced today the largest monetary
payment ever obtained by the department in the settlement of a case
alleging housing discrimination in the rental of apartments. Los
Angeles apartment owner Donald T. Sterling has agreed to pay $2.725
million to settle allegations that he discriminated against
African-Americans, Hispanics and families with children at apartment
buildings he controls in Los Angeles.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Throughout the 20th century—and perhaps even in the 21st—there was
no more practiced<span> advocate of housing segregation than the city
of Chicago. Its mayors and aldermen razed neighborhoods and segregated
public housing. Its businessmen lobbied for racial zoning. Its realtors
block-busted whole neighborhoods, flipping them from black to white and
then pocketing the profit. Its white citizens embraced racial
covenants—in the '50s, no city had more covenants in place than Chicago.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">If you sought to advantage one group
of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more
graceful method than housing discrimination. </span><font
style="font-size: 16px;">Housing determines access to transportation,
green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent
services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well
as your chances of being stopped and frisked. </font><span
style="font-size: 16px;">And housing discrimination is as quiet as it
is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it
doesn't need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to
prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that
Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist
social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally
injures, but does not bruise. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">The
historic fumbling of such a formidable weapon could only ever be
accomplished by a graceless halfwit—such as the present owner of the
Los Angeles Clippers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">As Bomani Jones noted back in 2006,
Donald Sterling has long been a practitioner of racism and the NBA
could </span><a class="ui-link"
href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=jones/060810"
style="font-size: 16px;">not have cared less.</a> Jones is rightfully <a
class="ui-link"
href="http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989">apoplectic</a>
at the present response. That is because he understands that the NBA,
its players and its fans, don't so much object to Donald Sterling's
racism—they object to his want of elegance.</p>
<p>Like Cliven Bundy, Donald Sterling confirms our comfortable view of
racists. Donald Sterling is a "bad person." He's mean to women. He
carouses with prostitutes.<strong> </strong>He uses the word "nigger."
He fits our idea of what an actual racist must look like: snarling,
villainous, immoral, ignorant, gauche. The actual racism that Sterling
long practiced, that this society has long practiced (and is still
practicing) must attract significantly less note. That is because to
see racism in all its elegance is to implicate not just its active
practitioners, but to implicate ourselves.</p>
<p>How can it be that in a "black league," as Charles Barkley calls the
NBA, an on-the-record structural racist like Donald Sterling was
allowed to thrive? Everyone now <a class="ui-link"
href="http://deadspin.com/in-10-minutes-espns-bomani-jones-lays-waste-to-the-ste-1569195989">wants
to speak to Elgin Baylor</a>. Where were all these people before? Where
was <a class="ui-link"
href="http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/04/27/clippers-stage-silent-protest-to-owner/">Kevin
Johnson</a>? Where was the <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/04/29/308054638/the-naacps-less-than-sterling-intentions">Los
Angeles NAACP</a>? <span style="font-size: 16px;">When Donald Sterling
was driving black tenants out of his buildings, where was David Stern? </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Far better to implicate Donald
Sterling and be done with the whole business. Far better to banish
Cliven Bundy and table the uncomfortable reality of our political
system. </span><span style="font-size: 16px;">A racism that invites
the bipartisan condemnation of Barack Obama and Mitch McConnell must
necessarily be minor. A racism that invites the condemnation of Sean
Hannity can't be much of a threat. But a racism, condemnable by all
civilized people, must make itself manifest now and again so that we
may celebrate how far we have come. Meanwhile racism, elegant, lovely,
monstrous, <a class="ui-link"
href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/house-rules">carries
on</a>.</span></p>
</article>
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